I arrived at the music of the Doors, and therefore the genius of Ray Manzarek, in rather circuitous fashion. I was 13, and at that time quite besotted with David Lynch's excellently peculiar TV series Twin Peaks. It stirred in me a passion for twinsets and fir trees, cherry pie and strong coffee, and naturally when I learned that my beloved Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) would be playing Manzarek in Oliver Stone's biopic of the band, I decided that I absolutely had to see the film.

Some weeks later, having failed on numerous occasions to convince the cinema staff that I was old enough to buy a ticket for an 18-certified movie, I conceded defeat and bought the soundtrack instead.

People can get a little sniffy about soundtrack compilations, but at that malleable age this proved a strangely influential album for me. It introduced me to the Velvet Underground, who remain one of my favourite bands, and of course it was also my first immersion in the music of the Doors themselves.

It was an awakening of sorts – to my young ears this was music that sounded otherworldly and full-grown. Unlike the neat, chirpy pop songs I heard on the radio, it sprawled louchely from the speakers. It wasn't the spreadeagled sound of the Stone Roses exactly, though to my mind then it shared a similar rambling expansiveness. Instead there was an intent to it, something blistering beneath.

In the months that followed I accumulated a few facts about the Doors – that Jim Morrison met Ray Manzarek at UCLA, that they would run into one another some while later in Venice Beach and form a band, that Manzarek then met drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger at a lecture on transcendental meditation. And I liked these stories; they fed this music's delicious sense of otherness. I liked the idea of these songs being spawned on an oceanfront halfway around the world, of cinematography courses and lectures about meditation. I liked the sound of a Vox Continental combo organ.

While I understood the charm of Jim Morrison's snake-hipped crooning, for me the seductiveness of the Doors always lay in the keys: the way they twinkled beneath Riders on the Storm, the constant nag of them in the side of LA Woman, the near-spasm of them at the start of When the Music's Over. There was always something so physical and commanding about their presence. It seemed to me then that the pulse beneath these songs was always Manzarek's playing, that those keys somehow embodied all the storms and strangeness, the fire and love, the other side of these songs.

It was the keys that made you feel as if you were always on the cusp of something: the strange outsider trying to set the night on fire, loving madly, riding that storm; it was the keys that made you feel you were occupying that teetering space on the edge of society, the brink of insanity, one step from wildness, from succumbing; that you were hovering somewhere between a threat and a thrill. And so to hear Manzarek play always summoned in me a similar feeling to all those other early adolescent adventures. It was the sound of car rides with boys and warm beer in bus stops. It was a stomach flip, a flutter in the chest, the veins rushed with blood. I felt charged by the danger of it, the glowering lust of this music.

I remember I had a particular passion for Love Street. Released as a B-side in 1968, it was inspired by the road in Laurel Canyon where Morrison lived with his girlfriend, and where he would sit on their balcony watching the hippies walk by. I liked the sweet surface simplicity of it, the lolloping joy of a house and a garden and a girl and "la la la, la la la la". And then it was the keys that seemed to twist it, to provide an unexpected undercurrent that drew your attention to the robes and monkeys, the lazy diamond-studded flunkies. And so the picture shifted, from easy domesticity to something more psychedelic.

And into that open-hearted, wide-world curiosity of "I would like to see what happens" my adolescent mind wandered. On the inside of my school pencil tin I had stuck a picture of Agent Cooper. Now beside him I added another of Ray Manzarek.